


We can't go on just runnin' away

by orphan_account



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Future Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-08
Updated: 2013-04-10
Packaged: 2017-12-07 20:29:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/752759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The door opened, and Stiles spilled a bottle of mango juice all down his front.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was partially inspired by Dark_K's masterpiece _Keep Walking_ , which I highly recommend if you want to read something that isn't Derek/Stiles, and also because she's just an amazing author who deserves all the love. The title for this piece comes from Heart's _Never_.

The door opened, and Stiles spilled a bottle of mango juice all down his front.  
  
Swearing, he set the now-empty bottle on the counter and went to the back, ripping off his apron. He borrowed Jen’s, since her shift had ended an hour ago along with the last vestiges of the evening rush, and it wasn’t as if she would care all that much anyway. Girl would give a complete stranger the shirt off her back and the last dollar in her wallet if she thought it would help.  
  
He took a moment - or two, or three, or really, who was counting? - to breathe and get the world to stop swimming and reorienting around him, and then he walked back out to the front.  
  
Until he saw him standing in front of the register, he honestly did not expect to find anyone still there, and he only avoided making any further messes by virtue of not having anything in his hands. They opened and closed impotently, then grasped the hem of his borrowed apron, worrying at the fabric. As he squeezed the slightly coarse fibers into his palms, he ground out, “What the hell are you doing here?”  
  
There was nothing but silence punctuated by his own harsh breathing, and Stiles could feel a dull rage working its way into a roaring fury that he had not felt in nearly a year. Life without Deucalion and his merry band of murderers making mayhem had been good to him, along with the rest of the ragtag pack of Beacon Hills, which oddly enough now included Ethan and Aiden. No one had ever defected from the Alpha pack before, but then, no one else had ever tried to seduce Lydia and Danny for the sake of infiltrating what passed for the local pack, either. Happy as they were now, Stiles figured it was the best mistake the twins could have made.  
  
He really hoped this latest development wouldn’t do anything to wreck that.  
  
“Well? Are you ever going to actually say something, or are you just going to stand there and stare at me some more?” Still nothing, and Stiles was so done with it. He stalked out from behind the counter and found himself with hands full of the softest, finest cotton. “Since you’re obviously not keen on talking at the moment, the very least you can do is listen to me and treat my words as gospel. If you’re here to cause trouble for Lydia, or for Danny, you can just forget it. They’re _happy_ now, and if you do anything to screw that up, I will hunt you down and put an entire clip of wolfsbane bullets in whatever is left of your heart, you get me?” He yanked on the fabric in his hands and asked the question again when it did not get a response.  
  
Finally, something changed. Strong hands came up to grip his own, to hold him still, the touch gentler than expected. Stiles licked his lips, still feeling that old anger, but it was banked now, muted by the contact. It shouldn’t even have made a difference, coming from someone who had hurt and humiliated him so many times when he was still just a boy - when they both were - but it did.  
  
“Seriously, though,” Stiles said after several more beats of silence. “Why are you here? And why now? I mean, you’ve been gone for years now - not even. You’ve been _missing_. Geez, Jackson, do you even know how worried Lydia was the first few months after you disappeared? She wouldn’t eat; she wouldn’t sleep. If Danny hadn’t finally hacked your parents’ financial records, we wouldn’t even have known you were still alive.”  
  
As he listened to Stiles talk about the damage he had done to the two people in this world he once considered his only family, Jackson’s eyes slid closed, but they opened as he spoke his first words since entering the smoothie shop. “I’m sorry.”  
  
“Oh yeah? Well, you can just - wait. What?”  
  
Nodding, Jackson’s lips twisted wryly, acknowledging the oddity of having that phrase come from him in a way that was not ironic or mocking. “You heard me, Stilinski. I’m sorry. I’m sorry for all the trouble I caused the pack, and I’m sorry for hurting Lydia and Danny. I’m sorry for leaving the way that I did. But I’m not sorry about staying away for so long.”  
  
“I don’t understand.” And Stiles hated to admit something like that to Jackson, of all people.  
  
“Look, when Lydia helped me finish turning,” there was an oddly amused lilt to his voice as Jackson said that word, and it niggled at Stiles; he’d have to figure it out later, “for a second there, I actually thought all of my problems were over. The wolf was there at the surface, but it was calm in a way that the kanima never was, and it was because my mate was nearby. And you drove me and Lydia to my house, and it was still fine - until it wasn’t.”  
  
“Well, why not?” Stiles asked when it looked like Jackson was struggling to go on. “What happened?”  
  
Jackson hesitated again, then said, “You left.”  
  
“Okay...” Clearly, Stiles was missing something still, and that rankled. He solved supernatural mysteries for a living. He should be able to solve this one, too. Then again, there may have been a reason he was still mixing up smoothies as a second job. He willfully ignored the little voice that insisted it was actually because of all the medical bills he was still paying off from the heart attack his dad had two years ago, rather than a commentary on his capability as a private inspector for the supernaturally aware.  
  
“It wasn’t until you left that I realized it.”  
  
“Realized _what_ , Jackson?” He just wanted a straight answer.  
  
Until he got it.  
  
“Lydia isn’t my mate.”  
  
“Then who - oh, shoot.”


	2. Chapter 2

As much as Jackson’s admission threatened to knock Stiles on his ass, it actually resonated with him as well. Since the end of his sophomore year, Stiles had felt as though he was missing something. While the alpha pack was doing everything in its considerable power to wipe out the Hale pack for once and for all, there was something to distract him from the strange gap in his life, that unfilled space that he did not understand.

One by one, the fledgling pack managed to whittle the alpha pack down, first by luring Ethan and then Aiden away, and then together taking on the remaining alphas. Though Deucalion was the leader of the alpha pack, Kali was the hardest to take down, the most determined to hang on. She evaded and tormented them for five years, driven to take retribution for destroying her pack. Two years ago, she kidnapped the Sheriff, and while they were working to rescue him, he went into cardiac arrest. It was a miracle he even survived.

When they finally managed to drive Kali, the vengeful creature, away a year ago, that was the end of the Hale pack’s troubles, save for the occasional unwanted guest in their territory. It left Stiles feeling slightly adrift and more aware of that strange emptiness than ever before. He never spoke to anyone else about it. After all, what would be the point? Over the course of their lives, everyone in the pack had experienced some form of loss, and this did not feel like loss at all. Loss was crippling - agonizing, even. This lack he felt simply ached; it was a dull sensation, weighing him down but not leaving him debilitated.

For the first time in years, he could not feel that bizarre not-quite-pain at all. Though his mind was elsewhere at the time, Stiles would be willing to bet that the feeling went away as soon as he saw Jackson Whittemore step into the smoothie shop.

Now, in the silence that stretched the air in the shop until it was taut, Stiles felt a war seething within him. It was so tempting to turn his old adversary away, to humiliate him on an even deeper level than Stiles himself had ever been at his hands. He knew himself well enough to know that he possessed the cruelty necessary to make it so. A few years ago, he, Peter, and Derek had captured Ennis and kept him shackled underneath the ruins of the old Hale family’s estate, trying to get information on Deucalion and Kali. As ruthless as Derek could be sometimes, he had not had the stomach to torture it out of their captive, and chose instead to keep guard while Peter did the dirty work.

Stiles had stayed. After all, someone had to be able to use the wolfsbane and to kill Ennis when they were finally done with him.

But when Peter tore off Kali’s head last year, finally becoming an alpha again in his own right and ending the Hale pack’s years of conflict, Stiles had promised to try to leave that part of himself behind. It was different when he worked as an investigator for other werewolf packs, witch covens, and other beings touched by the supernatural. He was not protecting people he considered his own, and so that drive to do whatever it took, no matter the cost, was significantly diminished.

More than his desire to be a better person though, Stiles wanted to make sure that he never had to suffer through that empty feeling ever again.

Breathing out a heavy stream of air, he watched Jackson warily and noted with interest the way that he refrained from reacting. When they were younger, Jackson would pounce at the first sign of weakness or uncertainty, knowing just how to press even the slightest advantage. Now, he was calm. Patient. Non-threatening. Stiles was not sure he could trust the change to last, but he could at least appreciate it for now.

“So, what happens now?” he asked when he could not stand to simply stay within his own thoughts any longer.

Jackson closed his eyes briefly, sighing a little in what looked like relief. It was odd, realizing Stiles had that much power over him now, and odder still when Jackson told him, “That depends on you. What do you want to happen?”

“Oh, so I actually get a say in things now? What, have you decided I’m finally old enough to make decisions for myself? Newsflash, Jackson, we’re the same age, and I’m a hell of a lot more capable of making the tough choices. When you were jockying for first position in _everything ever_ , I was busy mourning my mom and taking care of my dad and helping Scott deal with his parents’ divorce. I was basically raising myself and Scott since our parents were always at work. So what exactly gave you the right to just leave without telling me something that is so important to my life?”

Shaking his head, Jackson’s lips tightened for bit, though Stiles did not think it was in anger. “It doesn’t have to be, though. Not if you don’t want it. I left because I figured I’d already hurt enough people, and because we weren’t ready then, but we might be now. There’s a research position open at my father’s firm, and he says it’s mine if I want to take it and make the move to Beacon Hills permanent. But only if that’s what you want.”

Even though he had been pleasantly surprised by his steady demeanor earlier, for just a moment, Stiles wanted the old Jackson back. He wanted to see that old arrogance, that fire. He wasn’t sure what to do with a Jackson who did not fight back, and he wanted a reason to be able to rail at him some more - especially at the reminder that his parents had known where Jackson was the whole time, but had kept it from the pack, almost certainly their son's request. Still, Stiles had already at least partially admitted to himself that he wanted to try and make whatever this was work.

He bit his lip and then confessed, “I could feel it. When you were gone. I could feel it, and I didn’t know what it meant, but I hated it, and I never want to feel that way again. So - I don’t like you, and I don’t trust you, but I don’t want you to go.” _I don’t want you to leave me alone._

Jackson looked at him carefully, weighing his words, and then he nodded. “I can work with that.”

“You can?” Stiles asked, hating himself a little for sounding so insecure.

But Jackson ignored that, once again showing Stiles how much he had changed in the years that he had been gone. “Yeah, I can.”

The door opened, and Stiles looked away from Jackson to see a young couple eying them curiously and then glancing at the unmanned counter. Licking his lips, Stiles called, “Hey, guys. I’ll be with you in just a minute.” He turned back to Jackson. “So I guess I’ll - see you? Around?”

Instead of answering, Jackson asked, “When do you get off of your shift?”

“About an hour.”

“Do you mind if I stay?”

Stiles blinked. “Dude, there’s no _chairs_.”

“But,” Jackson pressed, “you don’t mind?”

“I guess not.”

“Then I’ll stay.”

“I -” he registered the faint sound of a shoe tapping an impatient staccato against the tile, and pulled himself away. “Okay, sure.”

Stiles plastered a smile on as he went to take the couple’s order. Every now and then as he worked, he glanced over at Jackson, who was leaning casually against the back wall with his arms crossed, watching him work. He could pretty much guarantee that things between the two of them would never be perfect, but then, wasn’t that true of every relationship? Stiles didn’t know what would happen in their future, whether or not they could really make things work, but he was willing to find out.


End file.
